Author: Brad Rourke

There is a city I visit repeatedly in my dreams. Rather, a place in a city, and a route to that city.

The place. It is a transport station, elevated in a sort of castle-like building on a point. It reminds me of the Flatiron building if it were a castle. Along one side it follows a river road.

This city is somewhat timeless. It sometimes is archaic, with only foot traffic. Shakespearean. Sometimes early 20th century, cars and trains. Other times contemporary.

The approach. For some reason the city is approachable only through a steep, lengthy, harrowing trip down steep mountains. I often have dreams in which I am careening — seemingly forever — down mountainsides on my way to this city. Somehow I know that his my destination. Sometimes I am ridin something like a sled, sliding down forested hills. Sometimes I am on a train. But it is always frightening, and always goes on and on.

Other times, my dreams involve my trying to reach this central station from somewhere in the city. It kind of pops up as a concept within whatever else may be happening in the dream. Sometimes it is a destination so I can escape from some conflict, sometimes it is my sought-for point of departure to seek something else I want. But it is always a central destination.

One night recently I had my first dream where the focus was my experience inside this station. It reminded me of the interior of Los Angeles’s Union Station. I was escaping someone or, more properly, skulking and hiding from someone. There was a flea market and I spent time at a sock table. In my dream, Neil Patrick Harris was also in the group of people at the table. We interacted somehow, and he ended the conversation by allowing all of us to take a selfie. He pulled out his own phone for this, and said, “OK, everyone, time for the selfie.”

Many people speak of a “tribalism” that seems to be on the rise in America and in our communities these days. By this they appear to mean, for the most part, a bipolar set of group identities, locked in conflict with one another and whose boundaries are based in large part on antipathy toward the other. In other words, two “tribes” each internally united by their hatred of the other.

I thought I would examine the apparent mindsets of these two groups. (I recognize there are not only two such groups but I am responding to the dominant narrative.) My circle of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances spans both groups both in terms of social media exposure but also, more important, personal face-to-face interactions. I wanted to get a sense of the internal story of a generic member of each. It is relatively easy to articulate, from each perspective, the case against the other (indeed Axios reports on a study from Survey Monkey that indicates each group sees the other as primarily “ignorant” and “spiteful”). But I wanted to get a sense of the best positive case each group might make to itself about itself, and how that would then interface with the story they might tell about the other.

Group One:

Collective security drives the story this group tells about itself. The world is dangerous and we must band together in order to survive.

In a world where our survival depends upon cohesion, what is our strongest imperative? Maintain order. We value order above all, and shun disorder. There have to be rules, they must be followed, internal enemies must be overcome.

This organizing concept of order can be seen in the story this group tells about its rivals. They are a “mob.”

This organizing concept can also be seen in the virtue signals that group members use to reinforce their group membership. In everyday interactions, it is easy to see exaggerated displays of deference to protocol, reinforcement of hierarchy, expressions of opposition to protest, and statements of loyalty to authority which often serve as evidence of piety.

Group Two:

This group’s story rests on being treated fairly. In a dangerous world in which we must work together in order to survive, I must know I am not being taken advantage of by those with more power in the group.

How does this translate into a driving value that we share and propagate? Demonstrate compassion. We show compassion above all, and shun meanness. People must be treated fairly, that means especially the vulnerable. Inequitable outcomes must be corrected.

The story this group tells about their enemy group: they are “hateful” people.

The virtue signals people in this group deploy are similarly easy to see: exaggerated displays of intra-group empathy, expressions of guilt about one’s privilege, expressions of opposition to “hate,” and displays of anger at perceived injustice towards other marginalized subgroups.

Most of my professional work is aimed at undermining this polarized way of looking at what is a much more nuanced landscape. For instance, it is simplistic to think there are only two such “tribes” and to treat them as monolithic. Note, too, that the fundamental drivers of each group’s story are universal: all human beings want to be treated fairly, and all human beings need collective security. So it is not strictly correct to say that there are “order” people and “compassion” people. These are constructed identity groups.

However, I still feel it can be useful conceptually to examine the two competing self-mythologies. They are, after all, the stories we tell ourselves. I need to understand and empathize with people’s starting points before I can see them as whole beings.

This is more than just funny. It is a wonderful example of the predominant institutional-centered thinking when it comes to communities. Watch this, and take every word deadly seriously — this is what I am delighted to try to undermine daily, by propagating a greater sense of agency by people in communities.

Public life is beset by three problems. Each is an extreme expression of a fundamentally human trait, exacerbated and amplified by some aspect of modernity.

Anonymous Atomization. It is a normal aspect of the human condition that we struggle to really take others into account as anything more than actors in our own dramas. Our modern society has amplified this to the extent that we have, each on an individual level, lost most of our sense of connection with others. We live in separate bubbles and the more our lives become driven by free choice, the less we see other people as “real.”

The Promethean Impulse. We want definitive answers and certain results, and we have built system upon system to make us more efficient. We live in a world of interlocking institutional mechanisms. The desire for assurance is natural. The myth of Prometheus is about humans’ yearning for technical power. Today’s scale has made this the only sort of knowledge. This has squeezed out our fundamental human abilities to manipulate our environment through small-group, collective behavior. When faced with a problem, our first thought is to search for an institutional or organizational response. This creates a bias toward ever more mechanistic responses.

Hyper-tribal-polarization. Humans naturally form groups and identify with them. Our most fundamental evolutionary piece of learning is that survival is collective and therefore our membership in a group is our one of our chief imperatives. This group identification is a double edged sword, and can create conflict between groups where they compete for some perceived or actual power or resource. Yet if survival is collective, then problems are best solved with others. In today’s environment, first two problems above have intertwined to create a hyperpolarized world of conflict in which our group identification is so strong, and our denial of out-group people’s humanity is also so strong — that we hate, and we even proclaim it as a mark of our allegiance. We hate to the extent that we cannot solve collective problems, we cannot interact individually with members of other groups, and indeed we ostracize those in our group who dare to behave moderately.

Are these the only three problems? No. But they are ones I have been thinking about the most over my career.

The good news is that the remedy in each case is within each individual person’s control. All by myself, without needing outside help, I can try to see other people as human beings, look to my immediate companions for problem-solving, and behave in more loving ways to my so-perceived enemies in other groups.

I attended a community meeting (10/9/2018) to discuss Rockville Town Square and Town Center this evening. Many thanks to Mayor Newton, the City Council, city staff, the Rockville Chamber of Commerce, Federal Realty Investment Trust, and VisArts for making it happen. It was an important meeting — hopefully the first of many.

So many important local elected officials attended: Mayor Bridget Newton, City Councilmembers Beryl Feinberg, Virginia Onley, Julie Palakovich Carr, and Mark Pierzchala, State Senator Cheryl Kagan, State Delegate Kumar Barve, County Councilmembers Marc Elrich and Sidney Katz. I also saw former Mayor Larry Giammo and former City Councilmember Tom Moore. I am certain I missed others who were there that I just did not see.

I did not intend to make any significant reports, but it seemed like it might be helpful to do so. So I started to keep track of the statements that jumped out at me. This is just my own list of what struck me — it is not complete nor comprehensive. I organized the statements into “concerns,” “ideas for solutions,” and “other thoughts.” They are roughly in order that I heard them or thought to jot them down. Others can add to them.

Think about how you want to spend your money the next time you shop online

Other ideas:

Properly identify the problem first — what problem are we trying to solve?

Federal Realty should do more to develop relationships with current business tenants (“how is it going, how was your month?”)

A resident: “I want t be on a committee” that works on this

West side of 270 (and elsewhere outside of the central area) disenfranchised

This meeting could have been a conversation not just a feedback session; residents have questions that could be answered and discussed in the room instead of waiting for an email response

Another meeting in two weeks

My own thoughts: The concerns and energy expressed by the standing-room and overflow crowd were overwhelming. I hope that we can turn this from an initial discussion into something more meaningful. It would be a mistake, I think, to leave everything in the hands of JUST the City, or JUST Federal Realty. I think some sort of ongoing mechanism for shared responsibility between the City, Federal Realty, local business owners, community members, and others would be a great step. If we had a way to create a sense of joint ownership of our shared space — tonight’s energy convinces me we would ALL benefit.

As one resident said, enthusiastically: “I want to be on a committee that works on this!” I hope many others do, too.

One of the things that gets in the way of making sound collective judgments is that, too often, we avoid facing the tensions inherent in the problems we share. When we sit down to talk about what to do about some community problem, we avoid tensions and indeed we actively seek to remove them when they crop up. There is a whole field devoted to “conflict resolution.”

Unproductive conflicts between people and groups should indeed be reduced, diminished, and healed. But when we need to make collective judgments about what we should do about some community problem we share — how to produce public safety, how best to educate our young ones, how to create more wellness, how to address economic change — we need to lean into the tensions inherent in these goals.

For example, if I want to live in a community where people are safe, there is a tension between group security and individual freedom. The more security I have, the less freedom I may experience. And there is a similar tension between personal freedom and being treated fairly. A great deal of freedom may result in my being treated unfairly.

These community problems are so difficult because such tensions are embedded and unavoidable. We cannot choose between them, they are not binary. There will be no “solution” but instead a collective judgment, for now, of how we will live with these tensions. The answer we come to today may not hold tomorrow.

Further, the tensions are not tensions between groups of people — they are within each of us. All at once, I want to be secure, to have freedom, to be treated fairly. This is how we are wired as human beings who live in groups.

Sometimes when I talk to people about community problem solving, and I raise the idea of tensions between these things that all hold valuable, I get the sense that what is being heard is “tensions should be reduced.” One hears it quite clearly these days: many see the healing of divisions as the clearest path to improvement.

Certainly tensions between people that develop into conflict need to be mitigated. But the tensions within issues need yet more attention. We may, for instance, heal relations between members of marginalized communities and institutional police forces. But we will still have the collective challenge of living in a safer society and how we ought to do that — and in making that decision we will have to face up to the tensions within that question.

It is in clearly looking at, and accepting, these tensions within issues that we can make sound judgments.

Independence Day is my favorite holiday of the year. The day we declared ourselves a free people. Our efforts were imperfect then, our freedom parsimoniously shared, our efforts remained imperfect through the decades, and they are imperfect now. We have much progress to make. But I relish this day, as I meditate on the courage — born of frustration and injustice — that our forebears showed in collectively saying “enough.” It was treason. Its success was unlikely. I imagine some felt as if they were signing their own death warrants, should the effort have failed.

When I am alone and fearful, in the dark mornings, contemplating some challenge, some task, some call to action that I must answer yet before which I feel cowardly — I think about them, and other pioneers of courage. If they could act, under much harsher conditions than I will ever face, then so must I be able.

Photo by A. Jarrell

And this courage is and has been on display not just on national matters of consequence. My neighbors display it. I see it all around. People quietly, courageously solving the local problems we encounter every day. I believe we are living in times upon which we will look back and say, “there began the rebirth of communities.” And the rebirth will have emerged as a result of national dysfunction. Here, where we live together, we face challenges. No force from on high will intervene. The mechanisms have ground to a halt.

So here we are.

Our nation is not some institution, some complicated mechanism established and set in motion. It grew. It emerged from villages, towns, cities — communities. It remains a land of communities, knit together by a mixture of geography and of ideas.

I am not blind to injustice nor infamy. I am not blind, either, to the precarious place the globe has become. But I feel I cannot afford to be overcome by despair nor by rage.

Today, the anniversary of our declaration of independence, I will spend time with neighbors and with family. And I will reflect on how best to improve my immediate surroundings. From a thousand, nameless, similar small acts, this land of communities might start to heal itself.